Short Notices

A HALL OF MIRRORS by Robert Stone. 409 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $5.95.

Not since the '30s have American writers been so interested in the novelistic possibilities of poverty and despair. This and the following two books, A Glance Away and The W.A.S.P., all deal in their own way with life in the slums. A Hall of Mirrors' three main characters slide along the rim of vagrancy in New Orleans. Rheinhardt is an alcoholic disk jockey who relies on soup kitchens for survival; his adoring girl friend has a look that makes cops mistake her for a prostitute; Rainey is a physically repellent welfare worker who gets chased off the streets by the very people he is trying to help. All three become ruinously involved with a right-wing tycoon who controls several top city officials and now wants to lead a cryptofascist "moral" crusade. Stone's theme is the inextricable grip of the underworld on its inhabitants; he draws a sure-handed diagram of brutal power and its victims.

A GLANCE AWAY by John Edgar Wideman. 1 86 pages. Harcourf, Brace & World. $4.50.

Compared with Stone's complex book, this slender first novel is barely more than a vignette, an Easter Sunday in a Pittsburgh slum. Eddie, a young Negro, returns from a year spent kicking the heroin habit in a Southern institution. Filled with tentative hope, he quickly finds that home has the same old tensions and temptations, that he is in the same old "black bag." In a foul tavern he encounters an alcoholic teacher on the verge of a breakdown. Though Eddie at first pegs him as a sentimental phony, their encounter grows from hostility to some understanding, and each leaves with a little more dignity and strength than he had before. A wisp of a theme, but written with a lyrical quality that makes the reader ache for Wideman's sad, inarticulate people.

THE W.A.S.P. by Julius Horwitz. 243 pages. Afheneum. $4.95.

In this case, W.A.S.P. becomes the author's unwitting acronym for Wholesale, Angry, Sensationalized Paranoia.

The book is a bitter attack on all whites from the W.A.S.P. of the title--a liberal white lawyer who often defends destitute Negroes--to charitable foundations, welfare departments and anyone with white skin. Horwitz, a novelist (The Inhabitants) and former welfare investigator in New York City, has not bothered to draw characters or write a plot. His people speak strictly in paragraphs, the blacks detailing their misery, the whites chittering on about the hopelessness of it all and concocting theories about a racial murder. The book is written in honest wrath, but Horwitz is one of those whites who have begun to see themselves as "Char-iey"--and to feel a self-contempt as deep as that of many Negroes. It is a paralyzing inversion.

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